Deathwatch Beetle

Your elbows are thick with rust
and stiff, as if you'd been
a tennis pro for way too long.

Every night when people are asleep
you can hear the creaks and groans
of all the joints in your body

and weird gurgles in the pipes. Sometimes
banging. The furnace still works
but the radiators leak

and don't heat up the way they used to.
Pressure fluctuates and there are
random surges of hot and cold water.

Visible rust and hidden corrosion,
flow constricted, backing up in eddies
and the furnace ticking over in the basement—

sound they used to call
the deathwatch beetle.


--image courtesy of Magpie Tales
Collection available! Knocking from Inside